Asus Eee PC 1008HA Seashell

As we know, ASUS have been churning out a long line of netbooks in the past couple of years. To be fair, the 70x series was simply too small and pretty ugly. The Eee PC Seashell changes all of this, at least aesthetically. This slimmed down Eee PC is probably the best looking so far.

The Eee PC Seashell 1005HA is almost identical to the 1008HA minus the recessed ports and flip panels.

The 1005HA has a 10.1-inch plus there's some fairly impressive hardware specs under teh bonnet: Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160GB, 2.5-inch SATA II HDD, a 1.3 megapixel webcam plus a 6-cell battery which, unlike the 1008HA, is removable. Asus claims that you'll get 10 hours out of the battery! We'll see.

There's the usual range of connectivity options including: 802.11 B/G/N Wi-Fi, 10/100Mbps Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR.

Before I go any further, I must add a key point here: the 1005HA is priced at around $390 which, in the current economic climate, is pretty cheap for what you get.

Ok, we've had a quick look at what the 1005HA is capable of but what about the rest of this netbook? The keyboard is pretty much identical to that of the Eee PC 1008HA. It's not a full sized keyboard but it does a good job; relatively large keys which make it easy to type on. There are two large shift keys but to accommodate them Asus has made the PgUp and PgDn keys smaller and pushed together in a cluster with the Home and End keys. These keys also double as the computer’s arrow keys.

The arrow keys on the 1005HA have dual functionality: pressing the Fn key and hitting the top row of keys lets you toggle your wireless connection, put the computer into sleep mode, change the screen brightnes, turn the display and audio on or off, or launch the Windows task manager. Pressing the Fn key at the same time as you hit the spacebar allows you to toggle the Super Hybrid Engine: underclock or overclocking the netbooks processor.

The touchpad is fairly wide and is easier to use that the 1008HA's. Left and right clicks are activated using a large button below the touchpad (there's a a rocker in the middle). Scrolling and multi-touch gestures are supported as well. Two-finger gestures anyone?

Above the keyboard there are two buttons: a power button, and a button that lets you turn off the touchpad if you don’t want to accidentally bump into it while using a mouse. Unfortunately, the customisable buttons for launching applications seen on earlier versions of the Eee PC are gone. Shame.

Graphics and Display

The netbook has a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel glossy display. It’s bright and displays colors well indoors, but looks like a mirror when used in bright sunlight. While many users prefer matte screens for outdoor use, the truth is if you mostly expect to use your netbook indoors, the glossy display shouldn’t be much of a problem.

The processor also gives the 1005HA an advantage over other nebtooks in that is can easily handle 720p video, but 1080p tends to be very jumpy.

Asus have been cramming some pretty useful tools into the Eee PC range of netbooks for some time now (such as the Super Hybrid Engine which allows you to overclock or underclock the CPU and the Eee Tray -  adjusting features such as wireless enable/disable and screen resolution at the click of a mouse) but the 1005 HA goes a few steps further.

Here's a few of the new apps availabel in the Eee PC:

• Eee Storage: Owners get 10GB of online storage space for their files (all accessed via Windows Explorer).
• Data Sync: This utility lets you synchronise your files to multiple computers.
• EzMessenger: instant messaging to computers to computer users on your network.
• Eee Splendid:lendid: Adjust the Eee PC display settings in a matter of clicks.
• Eee Docking: Lets you access a number of Asus applications by scrolling the mouse over the top of the screen.

There are also a number of other goodies bundled in such as: font resizer, parental control and a Voice Command function that lets you start certain apps using the power of the human voice (ok, rather dramatic but I think it looks good :) ).

To top it all off, Asus have also bundled in Microsoft's Windows Live suite of applications, Microsoft Works 9 plus you get a trial copy of Microsoft Office 2007. You can also view, but not create, MS Powerpoint docs using the PowerPoint viewer feature.

Sure, the Asus Eee PC 1005HA isn’t the smallest netbook on the market but it does include a good number of features that you won't see on the ultra-slim Eee PC 1008HA (think 'removable battery' for a start) but it is cheaper which will almost certainly appeal to fans and buyers of the Eee PC range.